My restaurant journey

I was asked by a potential franchisee what it was that they needed to be successful in the restaurant industry. As silly as it sounds the questions made me stop and think. The fact that we are constantly in the grind, and always putting out fires, makes you forget what it is that it takes to be successful. This thought process sparked a conversation with my son and in the midst of it it dawned on me. I think that in this business you have to have a serving heart. The willingness to serve needs to be there for you to be able to see the guests’ smile as the silver lining at the end of a rough day. The second thing that is needed to be successful is understanding that you are only as good as your last plate. Goodwill is amazing and it is priceless in this business. It is built through consistency and dedication. Processes and people are the key to building goodwill. It is built before your first guest ever enters your shop on the first day, it comes from your internal culture.

CULTURE, your shop has a culture. No matter how small your business is. Culture should be written on a plaque and adhered to, but it doesn’t need to be. Culture is best represented in the way you live, the way you treat your most important guest. Of course the first guest is the employee, the team member, the coworker. That culture you have will shine through in them and your guests will feel it, see it, and it will create the goodwill. Genuine encounters are the key to creating this culture within your team and through to your guests.

So what else is necessary to be successful in this business? I told my son that it comes down to getting your ass kicked and knocked down, and just getting up one more time. At the end of the day the best culture and intentions still cause us to get knocked down. We still will have moments of doubt, despair, hardship, stress, anxiety, and other difficult feelings in this journey. It is the ones who get up more again that remain in the biz. Getting up one more time than the guy next to you is what sets you apart from all other people in any field of work. Taking the lessons that failure blesses us with and saying “thank you” as you get back up and tend to your wounds. Its figuring out solutions to what seem to be insurmountable obstacles. It’s the feeling of achievement and pride that come from answering the bell one more time. I am cognizant of the fact that one day I will fail, I will lose, and I will have change course. I am also certain that this day is not that day. “This” day is every day. Its the day to succeed, to learn, to build, to coach, to give, to teach, to help others, to give away what you don’t even have for yourself. At the end of the day that is why we all do whatever it is that we do.

I also tell every potential franchisee to please think of every reason not to do this business. Think of the toll on your time, your family, your finances, the risks and hard work. Then if you still want to do it, if you have that serving heart and the toughness to get back up one more time, then welcome to the team and lets get started. Remember that this business is a people business. Spend time on your team, treat them like you want to be treated, coach them and teach them. It truly is like the saying says that “if you want to go fast, then go alone, but if you want to go far then go together”

Up to now we have been blessed to not have to close even one single day at our operations. Our stores have remained open and strong. That is not to say that the challenges have not been felt and dealt with. We continue to encounter wrinkles in this new “not normal” daily.

As a take out and off-premise concept we managed to weather this storm probably better than most. We did make changes instantly with the way we handled orders and interacted with guests. Our online ordering platform and our social media pages went from being an ancillary source of business and communication, to being the key to our maintained sales level and contact with our guests. At our primarily location we quickly added a pick up window, demarked the lines in our sidewalks to respect social distancing, and went to an all curbside and pick up process only. Contactless transactions became the norm so we had to address that as well. We printed QR codes that we posted as decals on our front windows. The QR codes took people directly to our ordering platform and our loyalty program. Once registered they could save their payment info there and also repeat last orders with a few clicks. Convenience and speed of service were always key, but now they became indispensable .

To promote these improvements and highlight already existing avenues with which to interact with us we printed small flyers that we put in every bag that went out the door. We posted these features on all of our social media and communicated them on our websites landing page. The flyers had a personal message from myself to all of our guests thanking them for their support and business during these trying times. They addressed the sanitizing measures to ensure crew, product, and guest safety. The flyers also served to point out the fact that we were there to serve them and maintain a sense of normalcy in their lives.

To deal with the new pick up window we added another POS system near our window and front door. We put it on a swivel so it could serve both stations. We realized quickly that the quicker we acted the better options we would continue to give ourselves. Rearranging the dining area was key to streamlining our process of getting the food from the grill to our customers car window on curbside orders. Dine-in tables became staging areas for curbside and pick up orders. Clipboards for our now “carhops” were key to keeping all of the orders organized and our process flowing.

Our catering sales disappeared at first and then settled at around 5 percent of what they used to be. Our sales never dropped though so that meant that our order count went through the roof. It was not rare for us to begin our day with orders for 200 to 300 total people for lunch meetings. Now these sales were replaced by 40 to 60 extra orders for families of 5 around our stores. This change in ticket average effected some key aspects of our operation. The container costs went up dramatically and the flow of the work shifted to night times. The container costs we could deal with but the lack of availability of containers became an issue. Every restaurant now wanted to be take out and they were using a lot more containers. The supply chain broke down with the combination of increased demand and forced shutdowns at their factories. This remains an issue today but we just adapted to whatever containers were available and created an approved substitution list for all of our key packaging items. The change in sales volume and sales tickets at night created a stress on the night crew and we adjusted by increasing staff at key times and shifting our prep charts to fit our current reality. Aces in places is our motto so some schedules were rearranged to make sure we had the best people at the key times. Our staff did a great job of adjusting and working through this with us.

I say all this to highlight the opportunity we have as small business owners at this time. We can be mobile and adapt. We can pivot and create new ways. We can band together with our crew and create stronger bonds with our guests. Thankfully our footprints are small and our fixed costs are low because of it. We are making it through this and have plans on how to deal with different scenarios should they pop up. I would advice restaurants to simplify their offering. Create items that travel well and are packaged well. This will streamline processes and prep, which will in turn allow for smaller crews and faster service. Stop thinking of your guests as ex dine-in guests. All guests are delivery guests now. They sometimes pick up but make systems for delivery only. Adapt quickly and overcome. Good luck and I wish all of my fellow restaurant owners the best.

The romanticized life of the entrepreneur! From the outside in that is, then you get into it and hope the drive and passion are enough to pull you through the stress and despair. Guests, suppliers, pandemics, floods, taxes, regulation, and last but definitely not least, coworkers!

Employees are your engine, your team, your main source of headache too. We love them all, appreciate their effort, but at the end of the day if a business owner is honest with you, this topic will rank among the most challenging for a small business. Who’s fault is it? Like everything else in the small business world, the buck stops with you. The majority of your employee issues can be solved at the interview table. Resumes do not tell the entire story, they are a black and white set of letters on a paper that sum up a persons past. Resumes are marketing material that gets them in the door, but don’t think that they are there to sell you on them. Take every opportunity to sell your vision to them. Through conversation you can try to see what drives them, what inspires them, their work ethic, their goals and their values.

It might take a couple of visits. It might take a fully paid observation day to see how they interact with your team. It might take a personality test. Whatever system you fall into it will take trial and error. It will take growth on your part. It will take growth in the complexity of your company. A little bit of luck never hurts. Hire attitude and teach the rest. Your crew is a direct reflection of you. They are your mirror and whatever deficiencies they have at their job are your responsibility. Ask yourself, do I want this person being my representative? If not then teach them and train them to be that. Give them clear attainable goals and expectations. A roadmap to success and every opportunity and tool they need to achieve it. Advice them and mentor them, and if this all fails be honest when its time to let them go. Use this difficult moment as your last teaching moment and tell them all of their great qualities and what they need to improve on to grow to the next level.

Employees are the engine, they are what drives our business, and we need to make sure we do the best at the moment of selection. Make sure they are aligned with your culture. They don’t have to make a career out of your business. I tell them that their job is to grow and learn so much that they become unaffordable and go on to bigger and better things. Our job as business owners is to grow our business so much that those bigger and better things are offered in our ever growing company. If both entities think this way, whatever happens, both will be better for it.

Since mid March the change in the day to day flow of life has been altered. Daily routines have dramatically changed for the average American. The direct result of this has been felt in many different ways. (Let me preface this by stating that overall our stores have been blessed and continued to operate). The operations have seen challenges ranging from staffing levels, to new required safety precautions, to the overall buying patterns of the customer. Since we are a guest driven business and our first guest is always our employee, lets begin there.

In my primary market the closures occurred March 16th 2020. Our industry was hit with forced closings and general guidance that restricted the type of service we could offer. For the employee the most pressing thing was safety. Is it safe to work, is it safe to travel to work, if I go to work and something else changes will I be able to get back home? These questions were compounded for people sharing a living space with older family members, young children, people in a higher risk category…

Children were pulled from school so childcare became an issue. The information was coming in by the minute and the punch in the gut that was dealt highlighted many things. One was our vulnerability as an organism, another was our interdependence on each other, yet another was our prioritization of “things” and the disappearance of ambiguity between wants and needs. There were millions of doubts raised and the main ones stemmed from confronting the illusion of safety and the thin veil of normalcy that we treated as our northern star. Now it was dark and foggy, yet we felt the innate need to keep moving, keep breathing, keep thriving, and keep hoping. These very human reactions, feelings, and questions were the ones we needed to address before we thought about the economic reactions and repercussions to come.

How do you address safety for your coworkers when you aren’t sure you can ensure it for yourself and your immediate family? What are the mundane guidelines of the law, more importantly what are the humane responsibilities we must meet to help stabilize this ever changing situation? So many question marks so far on this page and not nearly representative of the millions of questions racing through all of our minds at all times.

Finally how to deal with it? Like everything else in life, put yourself first in their shoes. See through their eyes. Most importantly live it with them and dont ask for anything you’re not willing do yourself. As far as safety at work, we followed all of the changing recommendations the doctors on TV told us to follow. We wore masks and did not allow people to come in to work that felt sick. To discourage the decisions to be money driven by the team member we authorized paid time off. We did not want to risk contamination because someone wanted to get some extra hours in at the J.O.B. After this we tackled the transportation issue. While most people had a vehicle , there were a great number of people that did not. Sitting in a crowded bus seemed less safe. It was less safe. To tackle this, being a delivery concept, we brought in a driver an hour earlier to every shift with the sole responsibility of becoming our own private taxi service for that shift’s crew that traveled by bus. This helped make their lives a lot easier and allowed them to be more at ease than before. As far as people with at risk roomies, we added so much disinfectant to our stores, gloves, masks, soap, and precautions that we wanted to be the last place people would fear contracting the virus. Again, the paid time off was available and only a few people abused this privilege. The ones that did will have to account for it on their own some day because chasing the bad and disregarding the good is not what I consider time well spent.

Now the paying guest. This was a little less tricky than dealing with our internal guest. These guests ranged from the unbothered to the unaproachable. We did not allow any guests to come into our stores and provided delivery and curbside only. We encouraged people to pay online and provided “contactless” options since day one. All safety precautions were strictly enforced and we even added a pick up window to the front of our building overnight one day when we saw the need. The inside of the store became an efficient processing center for our orders to get from the kitchen, checked, double checked, and to the door. We implemented a human chain that resembled the old fire brigades, instead of water to put out a blaze, we provided fajitas and ritas to deal with the stress and uncertainty.

Setting this tone with our coworkers and reacting quickly to serve our guests saved us headache and heartache that was well spent on other issues. This event continues to prove that if you make decisions with good intentions the results will always be positive. They might not be exactly what you want but the goodness of the intent shines through and provides you the goodwill with both your team members and your customers. We are not superhuman. We are not perfect, in fact being imperfect and owning our mistakes is endearing, its relatable, and it gets you in their shoes. Perspective is key in everything and was definitely key here.

Now that I was committed to a new footprint for my restaurant, an extremely simple menu, and a focus on food being consumed outside my four walls, It was time to make it work. NO MORE DISHWASHING TIL 3 AM!! NO MORE TURNING TABLES AND NO MORE 25 MEMBER FOH STAFF! Wait staff, mind you I am one, are like the wide receivers on the football team. They are always open and want the ball every play, have diva like tendencies and are flashy but the good ones are worth all of the heartburn and headache they cause.

THE TECHNICAL “PORQUE”.

At my full service restaurant I had a menu that was over 60 items in length. I had to make several sauces, prep many different items, and be prepared for whatever came our way. We eventually got our par levels down and became better and better at being less wasteful in both labor and food. In this exercise I became more cognizant of how to bring more to the bottom line, sometimes we don’t have to worry about percentages, after all, we deposit dollars not percentages. At this point full service, full menu was all I knew and the biggest thing you can know is that you don’t know what you don’t know.

The new business model was the unknown, based on all the efficiencies we had created and some that we had seen but could not implement. The new business model lessened my fixed costs so much that my catering alone would provide me a comfortable living. I ran a product mix of the best selling items at my big restaurant and figured which would be the most flexible and travel well. From the beginning of my catering revenue stream I had focused on cooking two items that had sides I could handmake, make to order, traveled well, were well known, and gave the best representation of the hard work and flavors we offered. After all, at my first store we made all the tables in our garage and bought handmade chairs. Handmade goes a long way.

With this simple menu came a simple equipment package. This simple package allowed efficiencies and low opening costs. This all allowed us to become specialized and, with time, implement efficiencies. I graduated with a marketing and an entrepreneurship degree so I liked, and thought, in terms of scalability. I knew this model provided that and it was a matter of fine tuning now.

OPTIMAL PRIME COSTS (I like transformers)

Restaurants live, or don’t, based on Prime costs. This is the addition of your labor percentage, and your cost of goods sold percentage, at least it is to me. I count everything that goes into putting the final product in the bag. I could get specific, and I do, down to every item percentage, but for back of the envelope math, my way works best for me. Like I mentioned earlier, the fixed costs had been minimized by the smaller footprint (1200 sq ft). My success now was truly in my hands, and as a business owner, that’s all you can ask for. Its never easy and it probably won’t be but I like having the chance to fail my way.

THE NEW BEGINNING

I opened my first store (the big one) on September 4th 2002. My mother and I labored, fought, scratched and clawed, for six years. Slow forward to August 15th 2008 and here I am ready to start this new path. I’m a little older, realized I still had a lot I didn’t know, but now at least I was aware of it, and I am laser focused on what needs to be done. I have scraped every rock that is below the surface of this river I jumped in back in 2002. The rocks can either serve to stop you, trip you, or be used as another foothold, a new place to plant and push forward. So I had. Some customers were upset, very upset. After 6 months of telling them I was leaving the old joint and opening a new tiny one I realized that no one realized that I meant tiny. Families showed up on my new first Friday and kids were in tears, no chicken dance to be had. The guests were mad that no seating area was available in this jam packed 4 table restaurant. The line was out the door for a short time and then they left with a coupon in hand that explained in writing what I had been telling them for 6 months. This ain’t that.

I was just going to do my catering from 8 am to 1 pm and be gone, selling, spreading the word, and for a bit I allowed myself to imagine a life outside of a restaurant. then a storm hit our city. We were flooded, without power, worst of all, I had just received $3,500 worth of product that would go to waste if I didn’t act quickly. A cousin and I found a way to reach the store. We came in felt the AC, lights came on, cooler was at the perfect temp, the day was saved. This happened a month into my new venture. We were lucky, some of our new neighbors were not. I gathered up what crew could make it to the store. I had my crew that had been with me for the entire six year journey up to that point. They were good, loyal, and we both needed the help to get through this storm. We had a team meeting to see how everyone fared through the rains, then we came up with a game plan. My cousin and I would go around the neighborhood knocking on doors of houses that had no power and would offer them a free meal, hot and fresh for them at 5 pm at our new store. I opened my original store at 5 pm 6 years earlier, hoping for a line out the door and great sales. This time we wanted a line out the door to give away free food. Power could go out at any time and all would be lost, we made lemonade out of it and gave away everything we had to cook. We did have a line out the door because, as luck would have it, one of the neighbors doors we knocked on was trying to organize a block cook out for the neighborhood. We told him to do that tomorrow because tonight we would do all the cooking for them. We told them how to find us, as no one knew our name yet, and find us they did. 80 plus families came in and got what we cooked. There were no menus, no options, no choices, just pounds and half pounds of free fajitas with all the trimmings ready to go once they got to the counter.

NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED

The power never went out. The rain stopped and recovery efforts began all around us. Neighbors still had no power so we gave out bags of ice daily, fed people in the store, took orders to their houses and had orders ready for pick up when they called. The dream of catering and going home was gone. No banker hours for me. ( Branch bankers, I mean, not investment bankers, those guys are animals. They have the work ethic of restaurant people with the brains of, something that has great brains.) Either way, the customers kept coming. Not enough to merit the extended hours and added labor, but who could say no? We are in this because we have serving hearts, so serve we did. People kept coming, and other guests would see the traffic, so they came in. At first people thought I was crazy. Delivering Mexican food to homes, absurd, and uber unlikely. It was 2008. Dinosaur fossils were still easily accessible just by kicking the dirt in your garden. We were looked at as too expensive to be fast food, because we weren’t, and too small to be a restaurant, because we weren’t. Skeptics would come in and stare. I had an open kitchen and my tortilla lady right by the counter. I wanted to show the fresh. When an order was placed you would hear the kitchen printer, then meat hit the grill to fulfill that order. Still they were apprehensive. My grandma was a gem, self taught to read, full of knowledge. Regarding hiring she would say “you can tell a lazy man by the way he walks” and not to be fooled by new hires because “every new broom sweeps good”, of cash handling she said that “people aren’t crooks, but you can make them crooks with poor systems”. Of the new challenge with the new business model she told me “don’t mind earning it”. So I didn’t mind it. I handed out the order with a business card and a “money later” guarantee. The guest would take the food and if they liked it they could call the store and pay then. If they didn’t like it, no harm no foul, a free meal and I got the chance any business owner wants. People called and paid, a lot. Then they called for delivery to their doors, that led to the office, and it grew from there.

I am a big believer in telling people the “why”. Since I am in the restaurant business naturally I wondered why they chose that name, restaurant?  Was it a place to rest? The vowels let us know its Latin and probably French, so I looked and this is what I found.

WHY DO WE CALL THEM THIS?

Like many inventions that become the norm, restaurants came from necessity. The word itself came from the French verb “restaurer”.  in 1765, as the story goes, a Parisian soup vendor named Boulanger set up shop with a sign inviting all who labor from stomach pains, and he would restore them.  There had been eating houses across the world since the 15th century and a complex history of the origin of restaurants or meeting places for people to share food, but Mr. Boulanger gave us the beginning of the word that became an integral part of our modern lives.

THERE HAS ALWAYS BEEN RESTAURANT DRAMA

An interesting fact about Mr. Boulanger and his “stirring of the pot” in this industry is that at the time he was sued by established “traiteurs”. These traiteurs would provide hot cooked food to people who did not have a kitchen of their own, and they did not like the fact that this soup salesman was having people come to him rather than the traiteurs going to the guests that needed the hot food but lacked a place to cook it.

WHAT HAS BEEN WILL BE AGAIN

That last bit of the story was definitely attention grabbing. Every generation has the blessing to see the changes in the music, dancing, clothing, cars, technology… These all are to adjust to the evolution of our times and our “intelligence”. The constant however is us. No matter what the question, the answer leads back to us, humans, we are fickle, ever changing. Thank God for that.  This allows opportunities, new adventures, better mouse traps, and creates new spaces. You have seen people’s garages right?  If there is any space available, we will fill it with stuff, with ideas, with creative solutions of things that were somehow already done before. Our egocentric predisposition allows us to take full credit and not only carry the torch forward, but say we created it, the fire that lit it, and you’re welcome! 

Well maybe that’s just me but this blog is cheaper than my therapist was so hear me out.  I began my, self described, epic restaurant journey with a full service, sit down, mom and pop, big hole in a big wall, restaurant that had 60 tables, a full bar, and an improvised area that always turned into a dance floor for the neighborhood children requesting the chicken dance on Friday nights.  I was young, knew what had to be done, how to do it, and boy did I get my ass handed to me. I got rattled, bruised and bloodied, but most of all tired. I learned the most important lessons during the first year. I learned how to manage people older than myself. I learned how to prioritize, make payroll, scrape by on hopes and hard work, support from my family, and a great deal of good luck.  Finally I had a place for people with hunger pains to come and get restored.  I also found out this wasn’t very epic at all. It was great, pleasant, and rewarding though tiring. 

MARTY McFly STYLE

In keeping with the “what has been will be again” theme, but backwards, kind of, I became a has been pretty quickly. The second year in my big store I began catering, that is bringing hot food to people who wanted hot food, but had no place to cook it themselves. That added a revenue stream that became vital to my sustainability and helped me to establish myself as someone that was there to stay. Or so I thought. The next four years were a mixture of driving dine in sales and expanding my catering reach by building customer base one guest at a time and then feeding sister offices of repeat catering companies. Then came the rent renewal… This is always the time to reflect, well not at that exact time, you begin reflecting a year before your lease is due. I began to look at the change in the market, the restaurants in the area looked different, they were getting smaller, my catering business was growing at a much higher rate than my dine in business, yet my rent was growing too. I needed less space, less tables, I just needed a place to cook. I had learned also that I cannot stay behind the trends, I have to get ahead of them and either fall on my face, or take the next leap forward. After much thinking I closed my big, happy, memorable and maddening place and shrunk to a 5th the size over night. I went from 60 tables and a full bar to 4 tables and barely a counter for my Point of Sale system. I was now a caterer. The tide had turned and the future looked like pre 1765, the traiteurs had regrouped and just figuring it out, the Boulangers were still there, but a new space had been recreated and now I was going to compete with Pizza and Chinese Delivery. Gone were the days of competing with sit downs and venues. I was either on the front end of train heading somewhere, or I had gotten run over by one and hadn’t figured it out yet.